With just a can
of spray paint, researchers can turn flat surfaces of any shape or size
—ranging from walls to furniture to even musical instruments — into touchpads,
according to a new study.
The technique, dubbed Electrick
by its inventors from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, relies on
electrodes attached to an object made of or coated with any slightly conductive
material. While not as precise as smartphone touch-screen technology, the resulting touchpads are
still accurate enough to allow basic control functions, such as using a slider
or pushing a button, the researchers said.
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"The technology is very
similar to how touch screens work," said Yang Zhang, a Ph.D.
student at Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII).
"When the user's finger touches on an electric field, it will shunt a
fraction of the current to the ground, and by tracking where the shunting of
the current happens, we can track where the user touches the surface." [10 Technologies That Will Transform Your Life]
The technique
is known as electric field tomography and uses an array of electrodes to detect
the position where the touch occurred.
In a video demonstrating
Electrick's capabilities, the researchers added touch control to a model of a
human brain made of Jell-O, a guitar and a section of a wall. When a person
touched parts of the Jell-O brain, for example, he or she could to see on a
computer screen the name of that particular part of the brain.
The researchers
said the technology could be used for educational purposes, by hobbyists and in
other commercial applications.
"The goal
of this technology is to enable touch sensing on everything," Zhang said.
"Touch has been very successful. It's a very intuitive way to interact
with computer resources. So, we were wondering whether we could enable these
touch-sensing capabilities in many more objects other than just phones and
tablets."
Researchers turned the surface of this guitar into a touchpad.
Credit: Carnegie Mellon
University
Smartphone
touch screens are made of expensive materials and require costly and
sophisticated techniques to build. As such, it can be complicated to create
touch surfaces on objects that are large or irregular in shape, Zhang said.
There are ways to enable touch control on larger objects, but these methods
mostly rely on detection of motion by cameras. However, these techniques also
have limitations, Zhang said.
"If you
use a camera, it won't work that well if the lighting condition changes,"
he said. "Users also could have privacy concerns to have cameras in their
homes."
Zhang added that the Electrick
technique enables touch control in objects that have been created using a wide
range of manufacturing methods, including 3D printing and injection molding. The only
condition is for the material to be slightly conductive, he said.
"It wouldn't work with
normal plastic, which is totally nonconductive," Zhang said. "But we
can use various carbon-loaded materials, materials that have carbon particles inside them, which make them
slightly conductive."
The slightly
conductive layer can also be sprayed onto the surface of an
otherwise-nonconductive object of any shape, Zhang said. This way, the
engineers can enable touch control in existing pieces of furniture, make a
touch-controlled steering wheel or phone case, or enable someone to turn on the
lights in their apartment by simply tapping the wall.
Zhang said the
Electrick surfaces are durable and could get additional protection by adding an
extra layer of coating on top.
The researchers
presented the technology earlier this month at the ACM Conference on Human
Factors in Computing Systems in Denver.
(By Tereza Pultarova, Live Science Contributor | May 26, 2017 11:47am ET
Original article on Live Science.)
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